by Nick Cutter
Could he possibly believe the journal? Would he do that up on the surface? Presented with those pages, wouldn’t he dismiss them as the ramblings of a madman?
You would, of course, he told himself. But you aren’t on the surface. You know what is on the surface? Westlake’s corpse. Do you remember what it looked like? Put that image in your mind, Luke, and ask yourself: What’s behind that hatch now?
Luke could answer that question easily: It doesn’t matter, as long as I don’t fucking open it.
But what if someone else opened it?
I believe Westlake, Luke realized with piercing clarity. Not all of what’s written, but I believe the ambrosia drove him insane. I believe him enough to realize we’re in very serious danger here.
“Let’s assess things,” he said to LB, who pricked up her ears. “We’ve got a broken communication link. We can’t contact the surface, and they can’t contact us. We’ve got an escape vehicle with no power, and a current ring that could rip it to shreds if we try to ascend. A crazy person who’s locked himself up. Another person, now deceased, who must’ve gone batshit, too. My brother, who’ll stay here out of pure stubbornness. We’ve got Al, and you and me. The sane ones.”
LB chuffed, seemingly in agreement. She was a wonderful companion—Luke wondered if, without her, he might’ve already slipped around the bend. He was getting the dog off the damn station. Lord knows she’d been through enough.
“Would you like that, girl? Early retirement?”
LB blinked and licked his cheek.
Okay, Luke thought, what’s the list?
1. Get the hell off this station. Mission be damned.
2. Take Clayton. Drug him if necessary.
3. Get back home. Bring LB.
Three objectives. It calmed Luke to break the situation down into small goals leading to one ultimate goal: sunlight, fresh air, home.
Granted, there were obstacles. Eight miles of water and pressure. His brother’s legendary stubborn streak. A sub without power . . .
And the thing or things inside the station with them. Inside, or partially inside, or struggling to gain entrance.
The thing his brother had willingly invited in. The ambrosia.
The thing whose lips Westlake could hear whispering on the other side of his beloved hole. That thing (things?) had wrecked Westlake. Oh, maybe it hadn’t touched him directly, but it had ruined him regardless.
It must’ve done the same to Hugo. Even Clayton? His brother’s mind was stony, but even stone eroded under constant assault. Luke’s own resolve was definitely weakening; a phantom hammer tapped along the block of his brain, searching for the seam that, when struck, would crack it in half.
“Come on, LB. Let’s find Al.”
20.
LUKE HAD TAKEN A FEW steps down the tunnel when it struck him that he hadn’t heard any noise for quite some time.
When last he’d consciously checked, he’d heard Al hammering away. It had possessed that steady, confident rhythm: the sound of a carpenter pounding a nail.
Now the silence was eerie. Luke wondered if Al was working on the generator’s finer mechanisms. That could be quiet work. Maybe she’d even drifted off to sleep. A little power nap.
A nap. That sounded nice. Luke’s eyes stung with exhaustion—except hadn’t they promised each other not to fall asleep?
The storage room was shadowy. The generator sat in a fall of light slanting through the open hatch. A huge cylinder made up of several disklike batteries wired end-to-end. Which made sense: you couldn’t use a gasoline genny in a closed space; everyone would die of carbon monoxide poisoning.
“Al?”
The room was dead empty. Where the hell could she have gone? Why hadn’t she come back for Luke? A bolt of panic jackhammered up his spine. What if Al had slipped into one of the same dream-pools that he had fallen prey to already?
He stepped out of the room. LB’s snout was aimed farther down the tunnel, where Al must have gone. Her tail pointed straight up, quivering.
“What is it, girl?”
LB’s haunches tensed. She growled, then took off.
“No!”
Luke couldn’t imagine losing the dog. If she disappeared in the warren of tunnels, he’d come apart.
He tore after her. Her tail vanished around a bend. Luke pursued heedlessly, not knowing what was around that corner—and in that moment not caring. He flashed around the bend, encountering nothing but stale air, then ran through an open hatchway (had Al left it open?) and hurtled headlong after the dog.
The tunnel described a wide ambit that descended so gradually that Luke wasn’t sure it was happening at all, then tightened into a choking spiral; Luke was hit by a wave of nausea brought on by the disorientation—until the tunnel abruptly ended in a crawl-through chute. LB’s rump was wriggling through the far end; she tumbled out, her nails skittering, and raced on.
Luke dove into the crawl-through. It was laughably wide in comparison to the access chute he’d been forced to navigate. He shifted onto his back, gripped the rungs, and swiftly hauled himself through.
Dropping out of the chute and rounding the near corner, he came to another dead stop. LB was hunched before a hatch. The hackles stood up on her shoulders.
“Easy, girl.” Luke ran his hand down her back, feeling the muscles jump. “It’s okay. It’s nothing.”
Where was Al? This was the only way she could’ve come. Luke inspected the hatch. It was locked from the other side. Al couldn’t open it. So where—?
A face rose up in the porthole. Malevolent and familiar.
21.
DR. HUGO TOY was pallid and shrewlike, his features pinched together on the pasty canvas of his face.
But he doesn’t look crazy, Luke thought. Last time yes; this time . . . no.
Dr. Toy looked like a man living under an incredible pressure that had warped his bones. Luke now understood how that pressure could make a man look crazy.
He held up his hands, a peaceful gesture. Dr. Toy calculatingly eyed him.
A scrap of paper slapped against the glass.
WHO ARE YOU?
The paper withdrew.
“Luke Nelson. Clayton’s brother.”
Dr. Toy nodded. Scribbled quickly.
DO YOU FEEL IT?
Luke nodded. “Yes. Everywhere.”
Dr. Toy shivered—excitement? Anticipation?
CUT YOURSELF, he wrote.
Luke’s brows knit together. “What?”
Dr. Toy slapped the paper against the glass. CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF
Luke said: “Why?”
I WANT TO SEE YOU BLEED SHOW ME YOUR BLOOD
Luke figured he might as well comply—what were a few drops of blood? He crouched over the grate. Its lattices were serrated. He raked the tip of his index finger over one. His skin opened on the third stroke, blood welling down the cut.
He showed it to Dr. Toy.
WIPE YOUR FINGER ON THE WINDOW
Luke did so. Dr. Toy leaned in, nose flattening against the glass. The blood appeared to mollify him. He wrote:
I’LL LET YOU IN BUT I’M TYING YOUR WRISTS
“I have one of the dogs,” Luke said.
SHE CAN STAY OUTSIDE
Luke shook his head. “No way.”
Dr. Toy bared his teeth.
OK, he wrote in thick angry letters. BUT I TIE HER UP, TOO
Dr. Toy set his shoulder to the wheel; the hatch opened inward, less than a foot. “Turn around,” he said. “P-puh-put your wrists through the door.”
“Listen, I’m not—”
“Shut up. Do it.”
Luke turned and thrust his wrists through the gap. Dr. Toy used duct tape—it made that telltale whoooonk noise as he stripped it off the roll. “Tight?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He dragged Luke inside and shut the hatch.
“The dog—”
“Scruh-scruh-screw the dog.”
“You said—
”
“I say a lot of stuff I don’t mean.”
Dr. Toy led Luke to a folding chair and shoved him down. Luke could see LB’s snout bobbing frantically at the bottom of the porthole.
“You lying bastard.”
Dr. Toy smiled, unruffled. Glimpsed in full, he was a reedy man whose long articulate limbs seemed to be constructed from knotted wires. He was slightly walleyed, his left eyeball drifting lazily toward his nose.
The room was about twelve feet square, with a low ceiling. Symbols covered the walls—Toy had fashioned them out of duct tape. They didn’t look scientific . . . more pagan. The rest of the room was scattered with papers, most of them balled up in evident frustration.
The smell was atrocious. Luke spied a heap of soiled overalls in one corner. On the surface, that heap would’ve attracted flies. Down here it just reeked.
“No access to the f-f-fuh-facilities, I’m afraid,” Toy said, displaying a slight congenital stutter. “Does the smell bother you?”
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
Toy shrugged. “I was r-ruh-raised by a nurse. She spent her days emptying bedpans and changing adult diapers. She didn’t want to encounter bodily fl-fluh-fluids at home. She posted a slogan above our toilet: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the suh-seatie. But if she ever did encounter tinkle, even a drop . . . She once thruh-thhh-threatened to make me clean it up with my toothbrush. And I’d have to use that same toothbrush until the bristles dulled and it was time to buy a nnn-nuh-new one.”
Your mom and my mom would’ve gotten on like bandits, Luke thought.
“Fecal matter,” Toy said. “Her term for it. Not doo-doo or poop-poo or even that old standby, shit. Fff-fuh-fecal . . . matter. Please understand—I wasn’t raised to be a man who’d shit in a corner. But good manners have a way of buh-buh-bleeding away down here.” Toy shook his head as if to dispel a troublesome thought. “What-whuh-what are you—I mean, what do you, do you do? Your job.”
“I’m a veterinarian.”
“So Clayton Nelson’s brother is an animal sawbones. Faaa-scinating. Did you get your s-stuh-start fixing up his spuh-spuh-specimens? You’d have been at work all day.” When Luke didn’t reply, Toy said: “Chaos.” He swallowed as if to center himself. “That’s why I locked myself up. In case you were wondering.”
That’s right, Luke remembered. That’s one of Hugo the Horrible’s specialties, isn’t it? Chaos theory.
“Oh, uh, it started normally enough,” Toy said. “We set up shop. Three men, three labs. Instability systems was my role. Basically, uh, was it f-f-fuh-feasible? The ambrosia—did it cure anything, or did it simply create havoc under an illusion of cure?”
He picked up a crinkled sheet of paper and smoothed it over his knee.
“I was working with . . . theories, yes? Known thuh-theories that apply and have value on the”—pointing upward—“up there, yes? But, uh, down here, nothing b-b-behaves as it should. Theories and mathematics just dissolve. Even the most chaotic events, if you buh-buh-break them down, have a pattern and order—and if they don’t, then at least the level of chaos can be calculated, compartmentalized and uh, uh, understood.”
Dr. Toy grinned widely—he seemed manic, weirdly chipper. His demeanor struck Luke as that of a convict who’d been kept in solitary confinement for years, and now, finally given a chance to speak to another human being, he couldn’t help prattling on. He showed Luke what he’d written. A hen-scratched theorem, incredibly complex.
“Picture a rock rolling down a mountainside. Or a bead of mercury running down the back side of a spoon. Or skeins of fff-fruh-frost bristling across a windowpane. The movement would seem random, yes? But it’s not. If we could catalogue all the variables in the universe, we could know with utter certainty what happens next—the, uh, the . . . the next skip of that rock, the-the-the way the mercury will slip, the direction each skein will buh-branch. But we don’t, so, so . . . chaos.”
He stopped pacing and stared at Luke, his eyes wide as if seeing him—really seeing him—for the first time.
“What’s on the uh-uh-other side of the hole is chaos. But not like any I’ve ever known. Unorderable, unnameable, untheorizable. And that’s what pure evil looks like. A chaos whose v-vuh-variables are endless—so huge even the universe can’t contain them. Chaos incarnate.”
Luke had stopped listening by then. One word stuck in his head like a shard of polished glass.
Hole. The hole.
Westlake’s voice, ragged and covetous, as Luke remembered it from those sound files: I put it through . . .
Luke shifted in his chair. Sweat trickled down his back, soaking the duct tape.
“What hole, Hugo?”
Toy’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen one. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”
“I read Westlake’s journal.”
“How is Cooper?” Toy asked, genuinely interested.
Luke blinked. The man clearly didn’t know.
“I’m afraid he’s dead, Hugo. He took one of the Challengers. He was dead by the time he surfaced.”
Toy’s face twitched. Weird voltages raced under his skin.
Luke said, “In his journals, Westlake mentioned a hole—”
Like magic, a blade appeared in Toy’s hand. A box cutter. He thumbed the mechanism. Two inches of blade slid out. Toy lunged forward, grabbed the matted hair atop Luke’s head, and pressed the blade to his neck.
“You’re luh-lying. You’ve seen a hole.”
Luke’s breath came in shallow heaves. “I haven’t.” He swallowed. The blade scraped his Adam’s apple. “But since I’ve been down here I’ve felt like . . . like something has been trying to crawl inside my head.”
The blade pressed harder. “Have you let it?”
Luke’s pulse shivered behind his eyes and at the root of his tongue.
“No.”
The blade withdrew.
“This chaos . . .” Toy went on as if he hadn’t threatened to slit Luke’s throat mere moments ago, “. . . it’s orderly. There’s the surface chaos, you could say, like a-a-a-a tangle of leaves and twigs laid over a ttt-truh-trap. A camouflage of chaos with something very logical and cunning beneath. A guiding principle or, uh, modus operandi. The real mmm-muh-master.”
Toy stood abruptly, kicking through drifts of paper to the nearest wall. Luke clenched his hands while Toy’s attention was elsewhere, trying to pull his wrists apart enough to slip a hand free.
“Protective runes.” He pointed at the duct-taped symbols, laughing stiffly. “I studied them as an undergraduate. Druids and, and, uh, that b-b-buh-bullshit. It’s all from memory. I don’t know if they have any effect at ah, at uh, at all.”
“I don’t see any holes.”
Toy smiled without humor. “I wonder if that’s because they don’t want me.”
They.
Luke said: “Westlake’s journal. I read it.”
“Oh, yes?” Then, almost as an afterthought but with genuine sympathy: “Westlake, my God. Poor Cooper. That poor, poor man.”
“Dr. Westlake said a hole appeared on his lab wall . . . He claimed he heard sounds coming out of it. Voices.”
“The voice in the sea, as your brother would claim,” Toy said acidly. “Some pressure-treated harpy wailing for Cooper to stick his head out and kiss her.”
Westlake’s voice again: I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips . . .
“A hole ate into the wall of my lab, too,” Toy said. “Small at first, growing steadily b-b-bigger. I spoke to Clayton about it. Predictably, he called me a fuh-fff-fool. I told him to come into the goddamn lab, I’d show him. He refused. Of course, he probably had one blooming in his own lab. And Westlake too, as you say.” He shook his head. “Yet none of us acted. None of us told anyone—Felz, Alice, somebody on the suh-surface. Why? Because it was so horribly exciting.”
A hole in Dr. Toy’s lab? Luke had gotten a glimpse inside Toy’s lab when they arrived on th
e Trieste. Its porthole wasn’t coated in black ichor, like Westlake’s, or draped like his brother’s. Luke hadn’t seen a hole. Of course, it could be in a blind spot. It wasn’t worth challenging Toy on it. Luke worked his wrists, testing his bonds. The sweat oiled his skin. The tape was surrendering its hold in increments.
“Professionally, I’m never more alive than when I’m on the cusp,” Toy went on. “With surgeons, it’s when they’re ‘in the cut,’ you know? Wrist-deep inside a-a-a chest cavity. For me, or for your bruh-bruh-brother and Westlake—poor man!—it’s wuh-when we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Of, yes, yes, unlocking some previously uh-uh-unknown system that our world operates under.”
“And that’s how you’ve felt down here.”
“Yes! If only we can just, just, learn more. See how the stuff, the ambrosia, how it operates. But that’s the pruh-problem—it has no stable base. It’s always shifting. Worst of all, it knows. It understands our needs and desires. Knows how to d-duddd-dangle that carrot at the end of the stick. By the time we felt the noose around our necks, it was too duh-duh-damn late.
“We’re in a Skinner Box,” Dr. Toy said with a sick smile, the kind of expression a slipshod mortician might tease onto a corpse’s face. “Operant Conditioning Chambers, to use the scientific name. Designed by B. F. Skinner, that old sss-suh-sadist. You put a rat in a box with an electrified grate. Two buttons on one side of the box, red and gruh-green. Push the red one, get a treat. Push the green one, get a shuh-shh-shock. Or vice versa. Vary the pattern however you want. Push either button and you get a tuh-treh-treat, say. Or either button earns the subject a shock. Don’t you see? The Trieste is the box. We are the rats. And whatever’s on the other suh-side of those holes are the scientists. They’re watching us. Seeing how we react. We’re the grand expuh-expuh . . . experiment.”
Luke continued to work at his bindings. He clenched his hands to stretch the tape. He could slide his wrists back and forth a bit now.
“Why did you need to see my blood?”
Toy’s focus was drifting. “What?”
“You made me cut myself.”
Toy waved his hand impatiently. “It gets inside you, understand? And wuh-wuh-once it’s there, you’re not yourself anymore. It has ways and means to gain entry. You’ve heard it, yes? It has a powerful pull. Very uh, uh, seductive.”
